Composer Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 on her 'Origin Of You' album with Becky Sui Zhen: "Each track is linked to our life stories"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: WILK
Published 6 February 2023
Chinese-Australian composer Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 creates music of otherworldly, ethereal beauty. Teaming up with fellow composer Becky Sui Zhen, the pair released the hypnotic and alluring album Origin of You last November, which they will officially launch this Friday, February 9, as part of Music for the Stages at the Darebin Arts Centre in Melbourne/Naarm.
Revolving around three images - 空 (Kōng), or Emptiness; 疼 (Téng), or Pain and 气 (Chi), sometimes known as ‘Energy’ - the album explores our ever changing sense of self and identity and coming to terms with who you are, where you are from, and where you are going, alongside the way our identify shifts throughout our lives.
“This is an album about two artists who got together and formed a sisterhood,” Mindy says. “It’s about understanding life, family and ourselves. It’s about transforming from being a woman into a mother. And it’s about human connection. We are not related, but we find a connection that comforts us as much as family does.”
Written and produced by Mindy and Becky, the six tracks on Origin of You are rare objects of beauty. This it not music that can be assigned to a genre, or that slips easily into the world of pop, yet it is full of footprints and handholds from music you love that allows you to embrace it wholeheartedly. ‘气 | Chi | Energy’ is a gentle electronica track with abstract vocals mixed with the traditional Chinese instrument the guzheng. ‘March’ is a stripped back track that highlights the guzheng further, while ‘I Don’t Speak Your Language’, with its attitude dripping, spoken lyrics and steady, lazy beat brings to mind the core elements of rap and R&B.
Origin of You is a beautiful album that brings to you a sense of peace, well being and calm. It is music that makes you think, reflect and above all open your mind to music that is different yet still adjacent to the pop music we all love. A refreshing and moving experience, Origin of You is an album to luxuriate in. We recently caught up with Mindy to chat more about the creation of the album and its official launch on February 9.
Hi Mindy, it is such a pleasure to chat to you today, how are things?
I'm good. It's been a busy time for me already this year. I'm just trying to start the year in the way that makes sense to me.
Can I just circle back to the Triennial Extra performance you recently did at the National Galley of Victoria? Talk to me about that event.
Yes, it was a performance of about 15 minutes that I did twice in front of an artwork. I was given different options, and we settled on a piece of work made by an artist from China. She used traditional tie dye material, usually people use that technique to create a pattern on cotton or linen, they just tie the material in a particular way and then put it in natural dye. Once it is dried they open up the fabric and the different kind of tie technique will leave a different pattern on the material. And this artist took this traditional art form into a contemporary concept and made a really big, large scale work. So I picked that one, and then I created music that responded to the piece in a very connected way.
That’s gorgeous, and your album with Becky Sui Zhen Origin of You, that’s a very connected album. Talk to me about the creation of this beautiful thing.
Me and Becky actually met through a friend, someone we both worked with. His name is Joe Alexander. And he runs a label called Music In Exile, and this is the label me and Becky release music with. Music In Exile is not for profit, it is a label that empowers migrant artists are even refugees who came to Australia, so this label is very special and they have released several projects for me. Joe suggested me and Becky do a performance together and both of us agreed without actually having met each other. We listened to each other's music, and we liked each other's music, and also we trust Joe, he is really good at pairing people! A lot of my successful collaborative projects came from his suggestion.
So we went to a coffee shop and had a really good conversation. Very soon we realised we're in a very similar situation in life, that we experienced quite similar experiences. She just lost her mother and I lost my father at that time, and we were just grieving. We just got on so well, we shared a lot of stories about growing up and how we missed our late parents. We got in the studio just based on our conversation, we wrote five songs in one afternoon, but at that point we were just creating for a live performance, we didn't think about releasing music. Later on, we just became really good friends and we both got pregnant and became mothers around the time and then we decided to release the album. We changed the music a little bit, it evolved, and we put it out after we both became mothers.
I imagine you shifted some of the music as well, following the shift in life because the album plays out very much like a loop, like the infinity of life.
We tried not to change too much from the original structure as a it was an accurate record of how we felt at the time. We did write a new piece for the album and made small changes, but not a lot. Every single track, except for one, is related to a topic we had in our initial conversation in the coffee shop.
Can I ask which track didn't come from that initial conversation?
The track ‘March’ came much later, probably six months later. The album became almost a record of our life experience and how we felt about those events, and each track matches the conversation we had. For example, the track ‘Pain’ is about how it hurts when we lose parents, and ‘I Don't Speak Your Language’ is responding to different racist situations we have experienced. ‘Watch My Mum Dance’ came from me telling Becky a childhood memory, in the 80s we owned the first stereo tape player in our area back in China and everyone would come to our place to listen to music and dance. And the song came from the memory of having a lot of people come into my home all the time and my mum was dancing every day. So each track is linked to our life stories.
That's my favourite track! It's such a burst of joy. What I love about the album as well is you have these very beautiful almost hum like sounding compositions and vocals. But then ‘Pain’ is something else and then ‘I Don't Speak Your Language’ could be on a completely different album, but it all works. Can I ask on that we did you feel comfortable in working together to just go let's just chase this feeling and don't be pigeon holed into what this what it's supposed to sound like, let's just make it sound the way we feel it should sound?
Yeah, definitely. We didn't really have any expectation. Our music basically just flows out from how we felt at the time. We completely trust each other and a good friendship is a very strong foundation for our music. Through working together we formed the sisterhood almost, we felt as connected as sisters.
Yes, you can definitely hear it. You are both experimental musicians and composers and I love hearing more of this , particularly with the evolution of technology. Your music feels like it's infusing this classical sound with your guzheng and the way you sing but with these distorted, almost otherworldly sounds. Is it safe to say that all forms of music has always excited you, and you've never stopped yourself from experimenting with anything?
Yeah. The instrument I'm playing, the guzheng, is a traditional Chinese musical instrument with 2,500 years of history, and it's always been played traditionally. With my work, I'm passionate about bringing this instrument into the contemporary world. But it’s quite a difficult thing to perform, the way of it's being played for thousands of years wasn't an easy thing to break. But the positive side of this is once I brought it to the contemporary world, it doesn't have a limit. The majority of my work is in contemporary art and music and I play jazz on this instrument as well, and I play experimental improvisation. And my recent collaboration includes electronic music and the guzheng, Becky’s world is electronic, experimental pop. So for me, it doesn't feel like my music has to be stay in its traditional form because no one has created contemporary content on the guzheng in the past. I basically have to create the template by myself on this instrument so therefore there is absolutely no limit.
Origin of You is out now via Music in Exile. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 on Instagram and Facebook.
The Origin of You launch party will be held at Darwin Arts Centre on February 9 from 7:30pm. Tickets available here.
